Recently, Valve revealed the price of Steam Machine and announced when the device would be available for sale. Some players associated this event with a potential announcement or a “sudden release” of a hypothetical Half-Life 3, which would have been an excellent advertisement for Valve's new product.
However, the company never announced a new game. In the community, debates about the existence of Half-Life 3 began again, and ideas about the game's cancellation started to emerge.
The well-known blogger-dataminer Gabe Follower decided to speak out on social media. He stated that “the game is not canceled” and tried to bring gamers back to reality. In his opinion, “Half-Life 3” was not even conceived as a launch project for Steam Machine:
I sincerely hope that after the release of Steam Machine, people will finally understand that the story about “RAM crisis delayed HL3 release” was complete self-deception. I'm tired of explaining that, in my opinion, it was never planned as a launch title. And I also don't think they would hold back a finished product for the sake of another. Valve always seemed too chaotic to synchronize two projects from different teams, especially when it comes to hardware and software. Imagine cutting down one of your biggest projects in years just to make it run on weak PCs.
Tyler McVicker — another well-known blogger-dataminer, specializing in information about Valve / Half-Life, drew the community's attention to the decrease in activity around a previously discovered project under the code name “TF”. It is assumed that this is not a slowdown in the development of a hypothetical Half-Life, but on the contrary — it may have accelerated. Currently, Tyler McVicker is preparing new material.
Theories about Half-Life 3 have been built for many years. Players are looking for traces of the “HLX” project in Valve's game code, it is considered a new part of the franchise.